Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

16 Dublin Bay, into which the Vikings sailed in the ninth cen- tury, is one of the great crucibles of Irish geography and history, famous for everything from Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf to its Martello towers and eponymous langoustines 1 . It is no accident that when James Joyce set out to ‘ forge...the uncreated conscience of my race’ he inscribed the course of his great novel, Ulysses , on a parabola from Sandycove via Sandymount Strand to its climax amidst the rhododendrons of Howth Head. The opening of Finnegans Wake , meanwhile, sets its own twisting course ‘ from swerve of shore to bend of bay’ , also leading, circuitously, to ‘ Howth Castle and environs’ . Dublin Bay, where the River Liffey empties into the sea, has been witness to military conf lict, busy trade and seaside leisure. It has been a point of op- timistic arrival and often melancholy departure, a site of yachting prowess and all too frequent maritime tragedy, even though its shallow and often treacherous waters were to an extent tamed by extraordinary feats of engineering in the eighteenth century. Although its scenic beauty became proverbial to the point of cliché, it is one of the paradoxes of Irish art that Dublin Bay was hardly ever portrayed in the great f lourishing of landscape painting in eighteenth-century Ireland. Its fre- quently acknowledged picturesque qualities make it all the more surprising that, prior to William Ashford, it had been so little chosen as a subject. No portrayal of Dublin Bay is known by other leading members of the ‘Dublin Group’ of landscape painters, such as George Barret (c. 1732-84) or Thomas Roberts (1748-77), though it appears f leetingly in the background of the latter’s View of the Casino at Ma- rino (exhibited 1773, Whitworth Art Gallery, Universi- ty of Manchester). Instead, Barret and Roberts explored the beauties of County Wicklow and demesnes at Carton, Castletown and Slane Castle, while Jonathan Fisher (1735- 1809) made the rather more dramatic scenery of Killar- ney his own. Prior to Ashford, only the minor, and rather obscure figure of William Jones (f l. c. 1746-47) seems to have painted a view of Dublin Bay, in this instance looking north towards Howth (Fig. 2). ‘Two Views of the Bay of Dublin’ REDISCOVERED MASTERPIECES BY WILLIAM ASHFORD, PPRHA William Laffan Fig. 1 John Rocque (c. 1705-1762) with additional details by Bernerd Scalé (1738-1826) Map of Dublin Bay (1756 / 1773) Private collection